Two Kiwi guys, two little dogs, one tiny home

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It started raining about 45 minutes ago. A winsome, windless, garden-moistening fall of rain of the kind that nobody objects to.

But these sprinklings are the outer petticoats of an overdressed battleaxe whom the meteorologists have named Gita.

Gita goes in for a hippie colour scheme.

Gita was a cyclone, officially speaking, as she tore through several Pacific island states in recent days. Since then the old cow has lost a bit of polish, a few outer layers of couture, a bit of her previous puff and force, as she traipses across the Pacific in the general direction of me.

Gardening was on a list of things I’d get around to at some advanced point in my life. “I’ll give gardening a try [or whisky, or baking, or Wagner’s Ring Cycle, or tai-chi] when I’m 60. Or maybe 55, ha ha.” That’s what I’d say, thinking I had all the time in the world — so much time that I could schedule hobby-epochs as though my life were a study timetable.

Life doesn’t go like that. Better to use the time while you’ve got it. Now that I’m mumbly-seven years old, it’s looking as though there aren’t enough dispensable liver-years remaining for me to discover whisky, nor enough wet Sundays for me to penetrate Wagner’s Ring.

But I have become a gardener. Every day, I work in my funny-shaped ornamental garden, and most nights before sleep I imagine what I need to do next and what that little precinct of mulch and shrubs might eventually become. So that’s a physical and a mental commitment.

The desert blooms, a bit. My ornamental garden in December 2017. Notice our then-first sunflower, held to its stake by a snippet from an old business sock.

In comparison to the challenges Tom and I have wrestled with (finance, land, power, water, downsizing etc etc), this thing was not a biggie. In fact, it is no bigger than your fingernail, if considerably more numerous. (more…)

Have you ever had one of those times when a “hooray” and a “boo” are equally valid? Christmas Day 2017 was like that for us.

Let me explain: it rained.

Yay, because it hasn’t rained noticeably for seven weeks, the grass has gone from lustrous Kiwi green to bleached Australian blonde, and an official drought was declared just the other day. In short, the land needs rain.

Boo, because it was Christmas Day. Could there have been, I don’t know, any other day in the past month when the drought could have broken?

But never mind. Our first Christmas in the Mustard Yellow House, our first Tiny Christmas, was a pretty joyous day.

Yesterday, our tiny house was host to an actual social gathering, with multiple people, for the first time. It was a kind of coming of age for us and the Mustard Yellow House.

The occasion was … none, really. Well, in a sense, the occasion was alcohol availability.

Last week our landlord/neighbours spent a few days in Australia and offered to bring us something back from the duty-free shop. The only thing we could think of was a bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin — not because we’re ginnoisseurs or ginheads but because Tom remembered the brand from a memorable B&B we stayed at.

The icy-blue bottle was brought to us — a full litre, enough to keep us in G&Ts for months. But then Tom said “We should have a G&T party,” so we did.